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Ungiven
Citation for published version:Banerjee, D & Copeman, J 2018, 'Ungiven: Philanthropy as Critique', Modern Asian Studies, vol. 52, no. 1,pp. 325-350. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0026749X17000245
Digital Object Identifier (DOI):10.1017/S0026749X17000245
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1
Ungiven: Philanthropy as critique*
DWAIPAYAN BANERJEE
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA Email: [email protected]
JACOB COPEMAN
University of Edinburgh, UK Email: [email protected]
Abstract
Drawing on field research principally from contexts of medical blood donation in North India, this article describes how gifts
that are given often critique—by obviation—those that remain ungiven: the care not provided by the Indian state for Bhopal
survivors, the family members unwilling to donate blood for their transfusion-requiring relative, and so on. In this way, giving
can come to look like a form of criticism. The critiques that acts of giving stage are of absences and deficits: we present cases
where large paper hearts donated by survivors of the 1984 Bhopal Gas Disaster to the prime minister of India signal his lack of
one, where donated human blood critiques others’ unwillingness to do so, where acts of blood donation critique and protest
communal violence, and where similar acts of giving over simultaneously highlight a deficit in familial affects and an attempt to
resuscitate damaged relational forms. We thus illustrate how critique can operate philanthropically by way of partonomic
relations between the given and not-given.
∗ Although we (Dwaipayan and Jacob) carried out our respective stretches of fieldwork in North India independently, in order
to avoid unnecessary distraction, we do not differentiate between ourselves when presenting ethnography in this article. Jacob’s
main stretch of fieldwork on blood donation took place in Delhi and elsewhere in North India from 2003 to 2005, but has
continued intermittently since that time. Dwai’s fieldwork presented in this article was conducted in 2009, and continued
discontinuously until 2011. We would like to thank Sandra Barnreuther; Aya Ikegame; Arkotong Longkumer; Carlo Caduff;
the Dartmouth College South Asia collective; audiences in Tokyo, Copenhagen, Durham, London, and Minneapolis; the
special issue editors; and the MAS reviewers and editors for their very helpful comments on earlier versions of the article. All
websites were last accessed in February 2017. The authors contributed equally to the article.
2
Introduction
This article unfolds through presentation of a number of scenes of critique that
find their logic in—and are both structured by and communicate by way of—acts of
bodily giving over.1 The distinctiveness of these scenes lies in their dramatization
of what we call activism as philanthropy. Giving over, in the scenes we describe, is
the condition of possibility of criticism. The given-over illuminates gaps between
the given and the withheld—gaps that become the basis of critical social
commentary. Crucially, the materials given over are, or make reference to,
human biological substances. Our focus here, then, is on philanthropic modes of
bodily giving over as scenes of critique. Some modes of what in the present day is
glossed as philanthropy, in responding to situations of human suffering, implicitly
criticize the conditions that give rise to the suffering it attends to.2 In the scenes
we describe, such critique is explicit—the giving-over of biological materials is
simultaneously and indissociably philanthropic and critical.
Let us clarify our terms and aims. Activism and critique are intimates. The
former presupposes the latter’s arguments, though the reverse is not true—one
may remain an armchair critic. This article thus forms a contribution to an
emergent body of scholarship focusing on practices of critique. In his important
work on the topic,3 Boland does not explicitly mention activism, but we suggest
that such an anthropology might need to expand its parameters to take account of
activism as critique operationalized. Indeed, this article is concerned with scenes
of critique in the activist mode.
Boland links our current order of the questioning of everything to enlightenment
thought. Though Boland is aware that there have existed multifarious critical
milieus throughout history, his core argument pivots on what he calls the
constitutive role of critique in the production of modernity. The point is largely
persuasive. Indeed,
1 L. Cohen, ‘Given over to demand: excorporation as commitment’, Contemporary South Asia, vol. 21, no. 3, 2013, pp. 318–
32.
2 Certainly, this point does not apply to all ‘philanthropic’ acts. For example, the feeding of the poor in temples in India or the
giving of alms does not necessarily wage a critique of suffering, but instead may take suffering as a condition of the world, and
an opportunity for the exercise of dharma. Here, suffering is naturalized, not critiqued. We thank one of the anonymous
reviewers for insisting we make this clearer.
3 T. Boland, ‘Towards an anthropology of critique: the modern experience of liminality and crisis’, Anthropological Theory,
3
Foucault’s seminal reading of Kant’s essay ‘What is Enlightenment?’ marks
practices of critique and self-examination as a critical feature of the
Enlightenment tradition.4 Yet, as Partha Chatterjee describes in his reflections on
Kant and Foucault’s essays, in this mode of Enlightenment, scholars’ self-
understanding was viewed from its inception with scepticism in colonies such as
India. Rather, the close complicity of modernity with colonial power made its
chimerical ambitions of universality and self-examination all too apparent.5 Yet,
any scholar of bhakti devotion, and in particular the sant movement, in the
subcontinent will be aware that practices of social critique emerged not only as
sceptical colonial negotiations with the Enlightenment. Rather, contemporary and
historical projects of critique have tangled colonial and indigenous roots: a
complex interweave of Enlightenment thinking and historically dynamic Indic
traditions. Our first case study is drawn from a guru-led movement in the sant
tradition called the Sant Nirankaris. Typical of much sant poetry is its strongly
non- Brahmanical tone. Ravi Das, for example, criticized Brahmins for their
proud and hypocritical love of empty ritual.6 Many sants were themselves from
low-status and generally lower-caste backgrounds, and taught that all human births
are rare and valuable—not only those of Brahmins.7 This kind of social critique
persists in present- day sant movements, which uniformly criticize elaborate ritual,
idol worship, and virtuoso displays of asceticism.8 What we draw attention to in
this article is the way in which bodily philanthropy—specifically, ‘voluntary’ blood
donation—is instrumentalized as the means of such criticism.
In the scenes of critique we explore, the biological materials given over are actual
blood and metaphorical hearts. The critiques they stage are of absences and
deficits: we present cases where large paper hearts donated by survivors of the
1984 Bhopal Gas Disaster to the prime minister signal his lack of one, where
donated human
4 M. Foucault, ‘What is Enlightenment?’, trans. C. Porter, in The Foucault Reader, P. Rabinow (ed.), Penguin, London, 1991,
pp. 32–50.
5 P. Chatterjee, Our Modernity (No. 1), Sephis, Rotterdam, 1997, p. 14.
6 J. Schaller, ‘Sanskritization, caste uplift, and social dissidence in the Sant Ravidas Panth’, in Bhakti Religion in North India:
Community Identity and Political Action, D. N. Lorenzen (ed.), State University of New York Press, Albany, 1995, pp. 106–
07.
4
7 D. N. Lorenzen, ‘Introduction: the historical vicissitudes of Bhakti religion’, in Lorenzen, Bhakti Religion in North India, pp.
18, 24.
8 J. Copeman, Veins of Devotion: Blood Donation and Religious Experience in North India, Rutgers University Press, New
Brunswick, NJ, 2009, pp. 4–7.
blood critiques others’ unwillingness to do so, where acts of blood donation
critique and protest communal violence, and where similar acts of giving over
simultaneously highlight a deficit in familial affects and resuscitate damaged
relational forms. The gift that is given critiques that which is ungiven: the care not
provided by the Indian state for Bhopal survivors, the family members unwilling
to donate blood for their transfusion-requiring relative, and so on. It is for this
reason that we suggest the term ‘partonomic philanthropy’. What the term signals
is the way in which critique operates by obviation in many of the philanthropic
modes we call attention to in this article. We draw here on the works of Davis
and Corsin Jimenez on the proportionality of transactions.9 Partonomies are
hierarchies of part-whole relationships. Though closely associated with computer
science and linguistics, their role in the representation of knowledge should make
them intrinsically interesting for scholars in the humanities and social sciences,
particularly in reference to questions concerning the distribution of resources.
Elaborating upon Davis’s work on partonomies in and out of balance in material
exchanges, Corsin Jimenez observes that ‘The part that we give is an indication of
the whole that is not given—what you see (the gift) is what you do not get (the
larger social whole). Gift-giving is thus an expression and effect of
proportionality’.10 We extend this insight in order to illustrate how critique can
operate philanthropically, by way of partonomic relations between the given and
not-given, with that which is given underscoring that which is not (the deficits and
absences we referred to above). It is partonomy, then, that makes philanthropy
critical.
Is it helpful to think with the concept of philanthropy here? The donation of
paper hearts to the prime minister is of course pseudo- philanthropic. Yet it
remains an offering in response to human suffering that is all the more effective
for the atypicality of the donor–recipient subject positions it comprises (those who
require care offering their metaphorical hearts for transplantation to he who is the
figurehead of the state that should provide it). What of blood donation? The
current situation responds to a government
5
9 J. Davis, Exchange, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1992; A. Corsin Jimenez, ‘Well-being in anthropological
balance: remarks on proportionality as political imagination’, in Culture and Well-Being: Anthropological Approaches to
Freedom and Political Ethics, A. Corsin Jimenez (ed.), Pluto, London, 2008, pp. 180–97.
10 Ibid., p. 186.
move to outmode forms of blood donation such as ‘professional’ (paid) donation
and replacement donation where relatives of recipients are asked to replace (in
advance) the blood they require. These modes, at least officially, have been
superseded by anonymous voluntary blood donation—a practice more in
accordance with global health standards. We have previously written about how
the renewed emphasis by the state and the medical establishment on anonymous
voluntary blood donation allows a convergence between it and Indic dana categories of gift exchange—a convergence that lends force and meaning to the
practice.11 But equally the shift to voluntary blood donation is a shift towards
modern philanthropic norms—the gift of blood is now (in theory) voluntarily
given and has a moral basis. The present promotion of anonymous voluntary
blood donation thus connects it to the kind of giving that is widely favoured in a
host of other contexts both within and beyond India in which philanthropic
action is considered to be both modern and moral only when directed
untraceably to anyone in need. This kind of philanthropy promotes ‘idealized
solidarity reigning in abstract humankind’ and fosters bonds between ‘abstract
subjects’.12 We will see, however, that, just as Oxfam and other international aid
organizations personalize their exhortatory posters with pictures of needy-looking
children, voluntary blood donation in Indian settings undergoes particular
processes of repersonalization, even as efforts are redoubled to foster
depersonalized voluntary donation.
In this reformed mode, one no longer knows but may imagine one’s recipients.
This widening aligns blood donation with the idea of service and sacrifice to
broader imagined communities—the nation, the abstract entity of ‘society’ and of a
‘family’ larger than immediate kin. We show how the bodily philanthropy of
reformed blood donation is made congruent with a number of different social
reformist agendas, including but not limited to those of the Sant Nirankaris. We
6
also show how a variant of these reformist alliances is found within overt political
domains, with political party activists and other dubious characters seeking access
to the ethical surpluses generated by voluntary blood donation, thereby
deforming the aura and status of practices hitherto ethically charged with diverse
reformist powers. Indeed, we show how, both conceptually and in practice,
philanthropic
11 Copeman, Veins of Devotion; D. Banerjee, ‘No biosociality in India’, BioSocieties, vol. 6, 2011, pp. 488–92.
12 M. Godelier, The Enigma of the Gift, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1999, p. 5.
self-interest and altruism do not disentangle easily. Rather we describe the tense
play between altruism and self-interest as a productive dialectic, as ‘philanthropic’
transactions of blood in North India produce tense visions of both the
possibilities as well as the limits of the fraught present and promissory futures. As
anthropologists know well, practices of gifting are hardly ever innocent. In the
gesture of forming and reforming human communities, gifts reveal the
vulnerability of social forms, and stake the possibility of their deformation. This
article, then, explores the tension between form and deformation immanent to
practices of blood donation in North India. The fragility of the form of blood
donation lends itself to its own unravelling and critique in the practices of those
that find themselves sacrificed at the altar of such a future. As blood circulates in
the social body in North India, we suggest, it acts both as remedy and as poison;
practices of blood donation hope to perform reformations of a national imaginary
while, in the same gesture, counter-practices seeped in irony reveal the sanguine
fragility of sanguinary visions.
Saintly transactions
At a Sant Nirankari satsang (devotional gathering) just off a busy arterial road in
West Delhi, a group of young devotees visiting from Chandigarh perform a
sketch on the theme of blood donation.13 The sketch dramatizes the story of a
young boy injured in a traffic accident. The boy’s father declares that he is too
busy to donate blood for the transfusion his son needs, but the two Nirankari
devotees who brought the boy to hospital volunteer instead:
7
Devotees: We are willing. Take our blood. We are human beings. We are not
related through blood, we don’t even know him. But we have with him a relation
of humanity.
Doctor: That is strange. You are helping and his relatives are not. These days
blood relations don’t help, blood relations are finishing. You have come here and
you are not his blood relations. A stranger is trying to help. Are you Nirankaris?
13 21 November 2004.
Doctor: These days, Nirankaris are giving a lot of blood.
Later, after his transfusion and he is no longer critically ill, the boy begins to sob.
Boy: I’m crying because the persons related to me by blood didn’t help me, but
you strangers (anjaan) on the road who are not related to me by blood, you
helped me. You gave blood. In my hour of sorrow all my relatives turned away. I
will never forget your kindness.
Devotees: Do not be obliged. It is our guru’s orders to help human beings with
blood. He says humanity is the greatest relation. We have not done anything
great; we have only done our duty. Perhaps God wanted to teach you a lesson:
only humanity is the real relation. Now take rest.
Boy: God is great. Now I realise the greatest relation is of humanity, not of blood.
The Sant Nirankari movement forms part of an inclusive reformist tradition that
crosses formal Hindu–non-Hindu ‘community’ boundaries. As we noted above,
along with other likeminded reformist movements, the Sant Nirankaris are
connected with and draw inspiration from the sant tradition of North India: a
8
loose family of non-sectarian saints, often from lower-caste backgrounds who
criticized elaborate upper-caste rituals and practices of idol worship. However,
while rejecting idolatry in favour of a formless god (nirankar), Nirankari devotees
coalesce around living gurus (satgurus) and attend his discourses in communal
gatherings (satsang). And while gurus say that to donate blood is to participate in
the service of humanity, devotees view it as much as a service or sacrifice to the
guru (guru- seva), for the purpose of his this-worldly glory, and for which, in turn,
they will receive the guru’s blessings and gyan (knowledge).14 Blood donation as
a philanthropic practice thus appears here at the conjunction of abstract altruism
and concrete practices of self-interest.
Nirankari Colony, north-west Delhi, 24 April 2004—it is Human Unity Day
(Manav Ekta Divas), a pivotal date in the Nirankari devotional calendar that
commemorates the assassination of former
14 Copeman, Veins of Devotion. Guru-seva, in almost all bhakti traditions, is ideally performed without self-interest, either for
the devotee or for the guru. Officially, this is also the case for the Sant Nirankaris. In practice, however, devotees were explicit
and unabashed in speaking to us about the blessings and other spiritual fruits that their devotional blood-giving would result in.
guru Baba Gurbachan Singh on the same date in 1980.15 The former leader’s
sacrifice is annually remembered through the staging of large- scale gatherings at
which devotees are strongly encouraged to donate their blood. Many thousands
of devotees give blood on this day—in Nirankari Colony, where the guru will
address gathered devotees, but also at scores of satsang bhavans around the
world. The Nirankaris thus stage a positively re-valued re-enactment of the
trauma of losing their former guru, converting his martyrdom from an experience
of victimhood into one of self-initiated ennobling virtue. In doing this, they
attribute to the successor guru an exhortatory aphorism about the transformation
of violent bloodshed into spiritually meaningful donation: ‘Blood should flow
into veins (nari), not drains (nali).’ An announcement over the public address
system declares:
When a brother, a sister or a son in a family is in need of blood, everyone says
take as much money as you want, but we cannot give [our own] blood. The
relatives of some Nirankari donors say, ‘Why are you giving blood?’ but it is great
of them to give blood for humanity.
9
In both this loudspeaker announcement and the staged drama with which we
began this section, Nirankaris imagine the possibility of constituting a social form
through the act of giving blood. Crucially, this relation between the act of bodily
giving and the act of constituting a wider social form is partonomic: in our
opening drama, the gift of Nirankari blood gestures to, and is only required
because of, a prior gift withheld by the family. The seemingly paradoxical final
utterance of the boy only makes sense in the framework of this entanglement of
the given and not-given, the abstract social form of the anjaan made sensible
through the re-personalized figure of the errant family. ‘God is great. Now I
realise the greatest relation is of humanity, not of blood.’ But, of course, it is a
relation of blood, if not a conventional blood relation. After all, this is a drama
that seeks to performatively call into being future altruistic donations. The
devotee performers both mourn the passing of ‘true’ blood relations (khun ke rishte) and celebrate the coming of the successor relation: the widened-out tie of
humanity (insaniyat ka rishta). The bad family is vividly portrayed: too busy to
care and donate for its own. The new abstract relations made possible by blood
donation (insaniyat) rest upon a call to the passing of an older, more concrete
relation of
15 On the background to this violence, see ibid., Chapter 4.
biological blood (khun ke rishte). If we call attention here to such a form of
bodily giving as philanthropy, it is to suggest that the philanthropic imagination of
anonymous giving is predicated on its particular re- personalizations. The anjaan after all is not the anonymous stranger presumed by modern philanthropy, but
rather draws its allegiance to the North Indian sant tradition. At the same time,
the critique here of the familial order does not lead in a straightforward line to its
rejection. In other words, the familial blood relation (khun ke rishte) does not
entirely eclipse the idea of a personal blood relation, but seeks to recuperate it as
another kind of blood relation (insaniyat ka rishta). If blood-giving here is
philanthropy as critique, then it is so partonomically: the given indicates its
entanglement with the not-given, the gift presupposes that it was previously
withheld. Philanthropic critique—as we shall continue to argue in what follows—is
10
thus a partonomic relation between the concrete practice of giving and a prior
failure of giving that threatens the constitution of a social whole.
The relation between the reform of blood donation and the social reformist
agenda of the Sant Nirankari tradition here finds echoes in other alliances, or
relations of reform, underpinned by practices of substance exchange in
contemporary India. Anthropologist Lawrence Cohen tracks precisely such a
reformation of the body politic in post- independence cinema.16 In his analysis
of two films—Sujata and Amar Akbar Anthony—Cohen tracks at least two
moments of a ‘nationalist recoding’ of blood. In the denouement of both films,
an upper-caste mother figure lies in expectancy of a blood transfusion in a
hospital bed. Up until this point, the narrative burden of both films has been to
relate how ‘traditional’ forms of relation—caste and religion—lead to her malaise.
Finally, in both films, the upper-caste mother figure is rescued by the donation of
blood from the lower-caste daughter- in-law on the one hand and sons raised
Muslim and Christian on the other. In this post-independence imagination of
India’s political future, blood donation thus operates to dissolve the boundaries
of caste and religion. Such an imagination is suffused with the Nehruvian spirit of
the times, where cinema played a pedagogic function to urge audiences to
renounce dividing, subnational ties. In such cinematic gestures, the weakened and
reconstituted mother figure often served
16 L. Cohen, ‘The other kidney: biopolitics beyond recognition’, Body & Society, vol. 7, no. 2–3, 2001, pp. 9–29.
as a powerful cipher for the nation and the future nation-making project at
hand.17
But why do sanguinary politics so often serve as the conduit for nationalist
imaginations in India? As is well known, Marriott posited a ‘dividual’, monistic
(non-dualist) nature of personhood in the region—whereby people are capable of
both giving out and absorbing coded material substances (i.e. substances imbued
with personal character traits or particular moral qualities)—that results in a
general emphasis on restricting certain modes of contagious social contact.18 For
11
instance, it is well known that, in many Hindu villages throughout India, caste
boundaries continue to be maintained in part through restrictions on who eats
and drinks with whom.19 But a confusing definitional tangle has bedevilled use of
the term ‘substance’ in the anthropology of South Asia.20 In Schneider’s study,
American Kinship, later drawn upon and modified by Marriott and others in the
Indian context, American kinship is portrayed as ‘a symbolic system resting on
the two contrasting but mutually dependent elements of blood (shared biogenetic
substance) and love (a code for conduct both legitimating the creation of blood
ties and governing the behaviour of those who are related by blood)’.21 Here
South Asianist ethnosociologists found a device through which they could
distinguish ‘Western’ personhood from what they took to be a quite distinctive
South Asian variety. For instance, scholars such as Inden and Nicholas declared
code and substance to be inseparable in Bengali culture—for example, adoption, a
so-called ‘social’ or ‘fictive’ form of kinship, may
17 S. Ramaswamy, The Goddess and the Nation: Mapping Mother India, Duke University Press, Durham, 2009.
18 M. Marriott, ‘Hindu transactions: diversity without dualism’, in Transactions and Meaning: Directions in the Anthropology
of Exchange and Symbolic Behaviour, B. Kapferer (ed.), Institute for the Study of Human Issues, Philadelphia, PA, 1976, pp.
109–42; M. Marriott, ‘Constructing an Indian ethnosociology’, in India through Hindu Categories, M. Marriott (ed.), Sage,
New Delhi, 1990, pp. 1–39. See Parry for important comments on Marriott’s conceptualization. J. Parry, Death in Banaras,
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1994. See J. Copeman, ‘The gift and its forms of life in contemporary India’,
Modern Asian Studies, vol. 45, no. 5, 2011, pp. 1051–94; and again Parry, Death in Banaras, on gift-giving as imperilling
contact.
19 H. Lambert, ‘Sentiment and substance in North Indian forms of relatedness’, in Cultures of Relatedness, J. Carsten (ed.),
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2000, pp. 73–89.
20 J. Carsten, After Kinship, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2004.
21 D. M. Schneider, American Kinship: A Cultural Account, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL, 1980 [1968]; C.
Hayden, ‘Gender, genetics, and generation: reformulating biology in lesbian kinship’, Cultural Anthropology, vol. 10, no. 1,
1995, p. 43.
take place only within and not between castes—and Marriott took to underscoring
this inseparability through use of the term ‘substance- code’.22 There is no need
to rehearse in detail the many criticisms to which Marriott’s ethnosociological
models have been subjected (Moffatt’s23 is perhaps the most systematic). As
brilliant as Marriott’s Samkhyan- and Ayurveda-inspired modelling of the implicit
categories structuring South Asian life is, the sources drawn on can appear
12
arbitrary and the categories and correspondences set in stone—in spite of the
language of fluidity and dynamism used to describe them— while the possibility
that South Asians might treat these reflexively and even dynamically deploy them
in inventive ways seems entirely discounted.24 Critically, what we see in the case
of Nirankari devotees’ pedagogic performances is how a key category within
Marriott’s schema (substance-code) may persist precisely by way of interventions
that recognize its fragility and historical situatedness.
The problem the performances address is that of the perceived disjuncture
between substance and code, namely between blood and its constitution of North
Indian family relations. The performance of reform described above
operationalizes an expansively redefined code—from the fallen modern Indian
family25 to a widely conceived humanity, achievable through a more generalized
diffusion of substance via voluntary blood donation. Similarly, in its official
literature, the Sant Nirankari order is explicitly critical of the decoupling of duty
and care (the order of law/code) from ties of blood (the order of
nature/substance). It proposes a successor relation- form achievable through
blood donation, with devotees’ donated blood coded with knowledge, spirit, and
intentions, enabling devotees ‘to establish blood relationship with other human
beings’.26 And, as we have seen, these will be ‘relations of humanity’, a term that
suggests a divorce between substance and code—with relational coding (duty, care)
no longer dependent on substance (the blood tie)—but which
22 R. B. Inden and R. W. Nicholas, Kinship in Bengali Culture, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL, 1977.
23 M. Moffatt, ‘Deconstructing McKim Marriott’s ethnosociology: an outcaste’s critique’, Contributions to Indian Sociology,
vol. 24, no. 2, 1990, pp. 215–36.
24 A. Beteille, ‘The reproduction of inequality: occupation, caste and family’, Contributions to Indian Sociology, vol. 25, no. 1,
1991, p. 28.
25 L. Cohen, No Aging in India: Modernity, Senility and the Family, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1998.
26 Sant Nirankari Mandal, Sant Nirankari Mission: An Introduction, Sant Nirankari Mandal, Delhi, 2003, p. 20.
in fact remain based upon substance (the blood tie). Thus the reformation of the
body politic through blood rests firmly upon an imagined form that already
entangles substance and code.
13
Moreover, there is nothing uniquely or essentially ‘Indian’ about the category. For
it to be maintained, cultural work will be required— cultural work that harnesses
an emergent flow of biological tissues. Staked in such cultural work is also the
possibility of immanent critique. As we have seen, the exchange and donation of
blood has been an evocative and fluid metaphor for all kinds of nationalist and
sub- nationalist projects in India. But in its very fluidity and evocativeness lies the
threat of its diversion to other ends. The spectre of pollution is never too far from
the imagined purity of sanguinary politics. This returns us to our argument that
substance-code distinctions live in their reflexive and dynamic practices within
which binary bifurcation of purity and pollution quickly collapses. Thus, in
practices of blood donation, as in other transactions of substance-code in South
Asia, the philanthropic abstract and the interested concrete never truly
disentangle.
Nationalist reformations
The post-independence filmic hope of reconstituting the weakened nation drew
upon concrete contemporaneous practices of political mobilization. While Nehru
himself was known to donate blood, and central and state government ministers
donated blood in front of the media at the time of China’s invasion in 1962,27
when senior blood- bank employees speak about their memories of political
involvement in blood donation, Sanjay Gandhi’s name is repeatedly invoked. In
recounting Indira Gandhi’s youngest son’s role in campaigns to boost voluntary
blood donation, a donor recruitment specialist at Delhi’s Red Cross blood bank
(situated across the road from the national parliament) also reveals her intimate
knowledge of the blood groups of Indian political leaders:
Sanjay Gandhi started the movement of voluntary donation in politics. He made
it his mission. He gave blood himself to start it off. Indira Gandhi was O negative.
We took two units of this type every 15 days to [her residence at] Safdarjung
Road and exchanged it for the previous units in her fridge (we
27 V. S. Naipaul, An Area of Darkness, Vintage, New York, 1964, p. 79.
14
had a special refrigerator). Rajiv Gandhi was B negative, and when he was PM we
had to take the blood to Race Course Road [the location of the prime ministerial
residence].
Another blood-bank recruitment specialist recalled to us: ‘Sanjay gave the youth a
four-point program: (1) blood donation, (2) tree plantation, (3) dowry abolition,
and (4) family planning, and Rajiv also donated blood before he was PM. There
is none like [Sanjay Gandhi] now’. In fact, blood donation did not form a part of
Sanjay Gandhi’s youth programme. Though at the time of the Emergency28 in
1976, Sanjay Gandhi did indeed put forward a programme of promoting literacy,
birth control, planting trees, and abolition of the caste and dowry systems that was
sometimes tagged onto Indira Gandhi’s larger 20-point national programme,
blood donation was not among these priorities.29 However, even though blood
donation was not a part of the official programme, it is significant that it is
remembered to have been (and not only by this recruitment specialist) and it was
most certainly a key focus of Sanjay Gandhi’s activities at various points in his
political career (as one of his ‘pet themes’30). For example, blood donation was
particularly prominent during his tenure as leader of the Youth Congress—an
organization that was formed in 1952 but ‘which was really activated in 1970 under the leadership of Mr. Sanjay Gandhi who gave it a constructive programme
of tree-plantation, slum-clearance, blood-donation, family-planning and
literacy’.31 It was probably at blood-donation events organized by the Youth
Congress that being seen to donate blood became so prized as a means to gain
advancement. (The Youth Congress was recently described as a ‘rag-tag bunch of
petty wheeler-dealers and politically ambitious wannabes’32—a label befitting the
earlier incarnation, as well, even if in the 1970s it had far more clout.) In so
doing, it became a key means for political parties to display their seva of a hyper-
generalized janata (people, public) to the media—a generalization well afforded by
anonymous blood donation.
28 Indira Gandhi’s suspension of democracy, 1975–77.
29 E. Tarlo, Unsettling Memories: Narratives of India’s ‘Emergency’, Permanent Black, Delhi, 2003, pp. 27–8; V. Das, Life
and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary, University of California Press, Berkeley, CA, 2007, p. 173.
30 K. Chadha, ‘Sanjay’s men and women’, Hindustan Times, 4 January 2011.
31 T. Kalathuveettil, Serving Youth Today in India, Krstu Jyoti Publications, Bangalore, 1992, p. 245.
32 B. Kang, ‘Toothless tigers’, India Today, 7 February 2004.
15
A little higher up the political food chain, organizing (as well as donating at) such
events became a means of getting noticed and is still marked in bold letters upon
political CVs. Sanjay Gandhi’s association with blood donation was such that
Rajiv Gandhi himself is reported to have donated blood at a meeting held in
memory of his younger brother.33 It is also worth noting that Sanjay Gandhi’s
systematic promotion of blood (and eye) donation among Youth Congress
workers was done at a time when he was promising to ‘donate new energetic
blood [to] old senile Congress’34—that is, to produce a new generation of leaders,
for ‘in any revolution, reconstruction or rejuvenation, cultural, social or political,
young blood of the nation plays a major and decisive role’.35 Part of his
constructive programme for invigorating the Congress, there is a sense in which
his camps also sought to transfuse the nation with youthfulness, the literal and
symbolic exchanging their properties. Unlike the ‘forcible deal’36 of Emergency-
era mass sterilizations, there was no suggestion here of forced blood donations
(though we refer below to accusations of forced political blood donations in a
later period). Yet, Youth Congress blood donations certainly formed part of the
mood music of the Emergency, and have ever since formed a template for mass
political communication: internally in respect of the observing leader and
externally in respect of the observing janata.
As we noted earlier, in post-independence India, the two most common forms of
blood donation have been paid and replacement— where family members donate
to replace the blood withdrawn from the blood bank to treat their ailing relative.
In 1998, India’s Supreme Court banned paid donation for safety reasons.37
With paid blood donation now illegal and a government order seeking the
phased abandonment of replacement donation, the country’s blood banks
actively seek out new constituencies of ‘voluntary’ blood donor.
33 A. Siddiqui, Son of India, published privately, New Delhi, 1982, p. 271.
34 J. Singh, Sanjay Gandhi and Awakening of Youth Power, Pankaj Publications, Hyderabad, 1977, p. x.
35 Ibid., p. 28.
36 Tarlo, Unsettling Memories.
37 Given that most paid donors were/are of low-caste status, the possibility that the
ban on selling blood was informed by caste prejudice has been aired (see, for example,
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/News071202.htm, [accessed 13 January 2018]—and see poem by Rao discussed below).
However, it should also be noted that the move brought India’s blood collection policy into line with international health
protocols, which assert that safer blood results from non-remunerated donation.
16
Blood-donation camps are staged at corporate, educational, and religious
locations, but also at political rallies. Most blood-bank professionals in Delhi have
little positive to say about the latter mode of collaboration. One former blood-
bank director we spoke with was repelled enough by the spectacle to want to put
an end to such camps:
Political camps are terrible. When I was [employed] at [a Delhi government
hospital] I said let’s stop going for these (but we can’t stop because they’re so
powerful) because they call everyone and when the VIP comes whether it’s Sonia
Gandhi or Sanjay Gandhi or whoever, they make such a big noise and the
moment he or she goes that’s it—they’ve all gone. We don’t need such camps.
There’s no other motivating factor other than ‘I’m trying to please the leader’—I
hate all these things. I find them so disgusting. But those are the realities.
Another blood-bank director—a pragmatist prepared to enter the ‘dirty’ world of
politics if it means replenishing his always-fragile stocks—recounted one such
political blood-donation camp:
Last year I got a call in the evening. ‘There is some political leader who wants a
camp to be held’. After great difficulty I reached that place—I met those people—
totally, totally disorganised. But they wanted a camp tomorrow. Next day when I
reach there with my team, we organise everything, and then a girl is brought who
happens to be the daughter of that political leader for whom the blood donation
camp is being held, and the political leader is behind bars, and he is fighting an
election from jail. Now to give an emotional backup to vote in his favour the
daughter is brought and they say we are to weigh the daughter against the blood.
It is an election point. Now the daughter is weighing 48 kg. And they asked me to
translate it into blood. So I roughly translated that this is the amount of bags, and
he said, ‘No problem, we’ll provide you with more than that’. And believe me, he
was the only person who won as the independent candidate. His followers wanted
to take advantage and make it an emotional upheaval to draw the sympathy of the
voters— wanted to draw advantage out of the situation. The votes were to be cast
on that day. It is a tamasha, but I just took the blood. Blood is blood.
These two quotations underline that the importance of display at these events is
two-fold: the political party makes visible its committed ‘service to society’, while—
as was suggested in the first quotation— the activist may donate in order to be seen
17
so doing by the leader they wish to impress. Such scenes of tamasha (farce/spectacle) reveal fissures in the logic of embodied gifting as partonomic
philanthropy.38
38 We are again very grateful to one of the anonymous reviewers for whom this story of the politician’s daughter whose weight
becomes the measure of blood donation brings to mind the story of King Shibi, whose kingdom, and then his flesh, and
If the selfless gift of Nirankari blood was meant to reveal the failure of the gift not
given by immediate kin, the political camp aims to rejuvenate an ailing political
class, as well as to demonstrate a renewed political commitment to a generalized
janata. Critique is rife within these themes of sanguinary rejuvenation,
replenishment, and renewal. Yet, as we have seen, while tending to an abstract
ideal of anonymous giving, the Nirankari gift nonetheless drew force from idioms
of guru-seva, the medium and metaphor of blood ties, and religious reformist
visions. Much in the same way as the Nirankari practice of donation entangles an
abstract manav with the particular, living guru, the political camp entangles an
abstract janata with particular, political self-interest. Similarly, the figural tie
between the Nirankari discipline and satguru echoes that between the Congress
party activists and leader, as both invoke the idiom of seva, albeit to different
ends.
then his entire body, become the counterweight to a bird who seeks his protection from a predator. Rather than our (the
authors’) apparent acceptance of the doctor’s description of this event as tamasha, might it not—in light of the story of King
Shibi— also be read as yajna and, in particular, the kind of sacrifice that consecrates a king (or, in this case, a politician)?
Though responding to this fascinating observation properly might demand another article, we offer several points: the politician
in question is a local ‘strong man’ leader of a small Muslim party that is moulded in the image of the Shiv Sena. This does not
in the least invalidate the points about King Shibi and the yajna-like nature of the spectacle (instances that are clearly from the
Hindu canon). Indeed, we would agree that the template in which a politician is weighed—usually against cash but here against
blood—does take its lead from the ritual consecration of the king and that, from the point of view of those political devotees
who participated in the event, it probably did form such a consecration (see Copeman on the conjunction of the king, the
politician, and blood donation. J. Copeman, ‘Blood will have blood’, Social Analysis, vol. 48, no. 3, 2004, pp. 126–48). We
think, however, that most members of the public would ally with the doctor’s point of view of the event as a tamasha. The
weighing of politicians against money, and more recently blood, is an established component of the political rally. At a ‘May
Day Blood Donation Camp’ in Rajasthan, 104 Congress workers are reported to have donated blood equivalent to the body
weight of Shri B. D. Kalla, president of the Rajasthan Pradesh Congress Committee (http://www.congressandesh.com/june-
2005/june2005.pdf, [originally accessed February 2017, no longer available]). On the other hand, gurus and temple idols may
also be weighed in this way. Gujarat blood donor recruiters related to us the practice of weighing idols of Krishna against
donated blood. ‘A 6-foot Krishna might be 200 units,’ said one of them. Also in Gujarat, a blood-donation event called ‘Rakt
Tula’ was staged in 2005 at the sixtieth birthday celebrations of the guru Swami Adhyatmananda. Finally, see Jonathan Parry
on the mode of gift called tula-dan, which involves the weighing of the donor against the gift to be given. J. Parry, ‘On the moral
perils of exchange’, in Money and the Morality of Exchange, J. Parry and M. Bloch (eds), Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge, 1989, pp. 64–93.
18
This distinction between the two practices of seva—the reformist and the party-
political—is worth highlighting. Blood-bank officials resent overt politicking—
blood donation as pristine service, or seva, is considered by them to be beyond
politics, or to belong to the sublime (that is, not the dirty, competitive, profane)39
dimension of politics. But beggars cannot be choosers. As a Kolkata-based donor
recruitment specialist put it:
Actually, we do not consider political donation to be strictly voluntary—there is a
political compulsion. They use us [namely the voluntary blood-donation
movement] to get votes on the basis of the consciousness we created among the
public. They utilise this to get votes. ‘Look how much we contributed in giving
blood’. They have never done it. Making people conscious was done by us. They
are reaping the harvest.
The director of a blood bank run by an internationally known non-governmental
organization (NGO) in Chennai recalled to us a Congress-organized camp at the
very site, 40 kilometres from the city, at which Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated:
‘This was on May 21st [his death anniversary] and we received 8 donors. 200 people were there for the photos and then they went.’ For this doctor, this was
the final straw. He no longer conducts ‘political’ camps. A blood-bank technician
at a Delhi government hospital recounted a similar experience:
One camp I attended; most probably it was for Rajiv Gandhi—you will not
believe—there was a corridor full of refreshments: all sorts of bananas and apples.
There were about 25 beds. The workers were waiting for the VIP, Sonia Gandhi,
to enter. Then Sonia came and about 50 people rushed and pushed into the tent,
they all occupied one bed each; their leader came. Only then would they let us
prick and they took photographs; and the moment she left they gobbled the
19
refreshments and ran away. I have seen this with my own eyes. So I feel it’s
nothing to do with doing good deeds on someone’s death anniversary. Because
when you do something like this you should do it very quietly, not with so many
cameras around.
Similarly, we heard a number of complaints from doctors about last- minute
cancellations of blood-donation camps scheduled by different parties after it was
announced that the party leader was unable to attend.
In the Nirankari narrative, the contemporary family first divorces code from
substance when relatives refuse to donate blood for one
39 The reference here is to Hansen’s schema. T. Hansen, Wages of Violence: Naming and Identity in Postcolonial Bombay,
Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2001.
another (namely in replacement). It then rejoins substance and code in a
perversely restricted manner, when non-Nirankaris enjoin their Nirankari family
members not to give blood ‘for humanity’, suggesting that Nirankaris’ care for
unknown others would detract from their ability to care for their known
dependents due to a damaging depletion of blood. The devotees reverse the
archetypal demands of blood donation in the region—demands are not made on
devotees for their blood, neither do they demand to receive it; instead they
demand to give it. This, then, is a reflectively situated alignment of substance-
code. Perceiving their contemporary detachment, the Nirankari response is to
seek to restore their symbiosis via blood donation as a mechanism of promise
and political critique. The image is of donated Nirankari blood circulating
outwards, mixing with many other bloods in order to both restore and
reformulate (for the scale is entirely different) the unity of substance-code—
Marriott redux. While the scale of the nationalist imaginary is grander, the
tension between the corrupt and the restorative function of blood is equally at
play in political rallies. If the Nirankaris stake a future utopic humanity on the
corruption of the contemporary family, political blood-donation rallies too are
rife with the ambivalent entanglement of utopic futures and a dystopic present.
Consider the refrain ‘Neta janata ka khuun chooste hain’—‘Politicians suck the
people’s blood’. The refrain is familiar, certainly in the north of the country, and
it reflects the popular conception of substance flowing in one direction only.
Money and blood are analogues.40 If it is people’s money that is usually ‘sucked’,
the relation with blood is underscored (and literalized) in news reports of
20
Congress activists forcibly taking the blood of underage citizens in order to make
up the numbers.41 Money and blood are sucked. As metaphor, the dubious
association of mining companies and ruling politicians in Goa is figured in terms
of a transfusion of cash/blood: an advertisement for a Konkani music theatre CD
called Corruption depicts a tube leading from a single blood bag (labelled
‘Mining company’s vitamins’) to two state politicians. Similarly, a 2012 political
cartoon shows a turbaned politician receiving a transfusion made up of blood
from the mangled corpses of ‘taxpayers’.
Political blood camp rallies, such as those conducted by the Congress and
Samajwadi parties, suggest a reversal of the flow. If the janata’s
40 Copeman, Veins of Devotion, Chapter 8.
41 Times of India, 9 September 2009.
blood/money is usually figured as flowing to the political class— a political class
figured in Banaras Holi cartoons as raping the janata42—what such rallies seek to
communicate is a reversal of the flow. That is, the political class offers its own
replenishing substance (making love, so to speak) to the janata. The rise of the
sanguinary political rally in the era of economic liberalization might thus be
understood as far from coincidental. Critics responded to the Shiv Sena’s massive
blood-donation camp on Maharashtra Day in 2010 by stating that, rather than
taking people’s blood, it should be providing them with water. The blood
donated at such rallies seemed to substitute for those substances of the civic and
of development—water, electricity—that people really need. Rather than the
provision of services, the political class instead provides blood via unpersuasive
postures of commitment. A substance that had promised to demarcate a
communicative sphere beyond symbolism, blood is relegated squarely back into
the domain of the purely symbolic: political blood donation appears as a
desperate, nostalgic attempt to reanimate the template of the ‘maa-baap’
paternalistic- yet-benevolent state43 in an era in which utilities are privatized.
Bal Thackeray responded to the retort that his party should instead concentrate
on providing water by stating that ‘Blood donation is the real social work’ while, at
21
the Bombay Municipal Corporation (BMC), ‘the leader of the house, Sunil
Prabhu from the Shiv Sena, suggested that his party should get a pat on their back
from the BMC for a successful blood-donation drive’.44 Indicative of its public-
spiritedness and ethos of seva, the blood drive is the sovereign gift of the party.
But a Congress corporator responded: ‘“Sena ko Mumbai aur Mumbaikaron ka
khoon chusne ki aadat hai. Toh isme nayi baat kya hai?” (Sena is known for
sucking the blood of the common Mumbaikar. There’s nothing new or
praiseworthy about this).’ We are back, then, with the more familiar practice and
metaphor of illicit extraction. The accusation is that the party sucks the blood of
city dwellers, which it then passes off as a gift from itself: the donated blood is framed as a gift to the very janata, or Mumbaikar, it is extracted from. But that
was not all. Another Congress corporator ‘alleged that the blood donation
42 L. Cohen, ‘Holi in Banaras and the Mahaland of modernity’, GLQ, vol. 2, no. 1, 1995, pp. 399–424.
43 W. Gould, Religion and Conflict in Modern South Asia, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2011, p. 182.
44 DNA, 30 April 2010.
drive was conducted by luring union workers in the Shiv Sena with the promise of
a permanent job’.45 Whether or not there is weight to the accusation, it contains
more than a faint echo of the forcible deals of Emergency-era India, in which the
granting or regularization of a plot of land might be dependent on undergoing
sterilization.46 The very means by which the party seeks to show it does
constructive seva—providing for, not extracting from, the people—is reduced back
down to the level of (literal) khuun choosna.
In such scenes of fake and extractive giving, the partonomic logic of bodily
philanthropy becomes dangerously transparent. The gift presented as a remedy is
reframed itself as poisonous due to its prior illicit extraction. In the political
camp, it is no longer easy to distinguish between the remedy and the poison, or
the gift that is given from that which is extracted, or the reformist part from the
suspended whole. In the following section, we explore how this logic of extractive
22
contamination takes on a material force in the world of the survivor-activists of
the Bhopal Gas Disaster of 1984 and returns us to the scene of bodily
philanthropy as partonomic critique.
Critique and contamination
In 1984, a poisonous cloud of methyl isocyanate leaked out of a negligently
maintained Union Carbide plant in Bhopal. Over the course of the night, the gas
cloud quickly engulfed the slum settlements that surround the factory, leading to
the immediate death of over 2,000. In the last 24 years, more than 20,000 have
succumbed to the slower effects of the poison and about 100,000 more have
been left with varying degrees of disability and impairment. The corporations
responsible have continued to evade responsibility for the tragedy; Dow
Chemicals bought over Union Carbide in 1999 claiming responsibility over only
Carbide’s assets and not its liabilities. The site—upon which the survivors have no
choice but to continue to live—remains toxic and the groundwater poisoned. Very
little of the compensation promised has trickled down. For its part, the Indian
government has failed to provide adequate healthcare to the survivors. It refuses
to recognize obvious signs of second-generation effects and
45 Ibid.
46 See Tarlo, Unsettling Memories.
has failed also to deliver upon promises of public medical research into the
chronic effects of this poisoning.
Faced with these circumstances, over the last 24 years, the survivors have
organized a highly charged and widely networked international ‘campaign for
justice’. Within the affected slums, the survivor-activists have set up a health clinic
that warns against psychopharmacology and excessive pharmaceutical use. This is
consonant with the broader tenor of the activist movement; its ongoing effort has
been to link the original disaster of 1984 to the abuses of multinational
pharmaceutical companies in the present. The Bhopal activist network comprises
23
several sub-groups that come under a broader conglomerate organization—‘The
International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal (ICJB)’.
In February 2009, the ICJB gathered together about 50 survivors and activists
and set out on foot from Bhopal. The destination in mind was New Delhi, the
capital city that lies about 500 miles north. The street in the capital on which they
converged (and do so almost every year) lies not far from the administrative
centre of Rajpath and India Gate. Called ‘Jantar Mantar’, it is named after a
historic eighteenth-century astronomical observatory that it circles. In recent
decades, ‘Jantar Mantar’ has been administratively marked, cordoned off, and
policed for a very different purpose—designated by the city administration as the
space within which groups of civil dissent can make public displays of protest.
The Bhopalis are not alone here; they find themselves flanked by a group of
Tibetan protesters on one side, mourning and protesting the violence against
their kin by the Chinese government. While the Tibetans remain a constant
presence, other groups come and go.
During 2009, the ICJB leadership set into motion a series of planned protests.
We focus here on two strategic actions led by the second-generation victims of
the disaster, children then in their early teens that gather under the sub-
organizational umbrella of ‘Children Against Dow-Carbide’. In the first action,
Bhopali children reach out to their peers in elite schools in New Delhi. Sarita,
Rafat, Yasmin, and Safreen, some of the leaders of the sub-organization,
painstakingly detail to them the effects of the gas disaster on their present lives.
Questions and conversations follow this presentation, after which both the
Bhopali children and the school children from Delhi write letters to the Indian
prime minister (the de facto addressee of most Bhopali public interventions).
However, while the Delhi children write letters in conventional pencil and ink,
Children Against Dow-Carbide use
blood collected from young Bhopali adults at the protest site. It is worth keeping
in mind that many of these young adults were babies at the time of the disaster
and have grown up with genetic impairment and amidst environmental
contamination. With this blood-ink, Sarita, Shweta, Yasmin, and others write a
letter to the prime minister asking in the most courteous of tones for a long-
denied appointment. In 2009, the text of the letter read as follows:
24
Dear PM, We are people poisoned by Union Carbide. We have walked more
than 800 km just to meet you. For the last 19 days, we have been sitting at Jantar
Mantar. Would you please take one hour out of your busy schedule to meet us at
Jantar Mantar? That is all I wanted to say. On behalf of the Bhopal victims—
Yasmin Khan, on behalf of Bhopal Survivors.
In this strategic action, the violence of the disaster was routed first through the
contaminated bodies of those directly affected and then through the pen of 11-
year-old Yasmin, who knew its effect since birth. In a public event, it was then
inscribed as a public letter addressed to the prime minister. Along with the letter,
the medium of the writing (blood) was prominently displayed in medical
container vials. The children then carried this letter-in-blood to the residence of
the prime minister and had it sent in via emissaries, after much wrangling with
security.
The medical instruments in the moment of writing—the syringe, the vial, and so
on—point to one possible valence of blood that the activists are well acquainted
with—its evidentiary quality. In one context, it plays a part as evidence of
contamination and suffering, allowing claims to be made for compensation and
future medical care. The medical testing of blood is well known as a standard
evidence-gathering trope. Here, this evidence is literalized in an expression
through writing. Thus, blood here takes on a valence that rejects the transparency
of medical evidence. Instead, a history of violence emerges from the depth of the
body, travels through the instrument of the activists, and confers depth to a
written message whose material medium deconstructs its sarcastic message.
Again, the materiality of blood is at stake—its evidentiary qualities run counter to
governmental strategies of testing: that is, the surveys that were carried out in the
early years after the disaster that denied second- generation effects. Writing with
blood establishes an alternative technique for making suffering visible. Blood
begins to write its own history, calling out for acknowledgement that is denied to it
by governmental biomedical measures. By performing the disjunction
between medium and message, writing with blood calls to attention the gap
between a corporeal history of violence and the naturalization of this violence.
The implicit sarcasm in this tone—‘Would you please take one hour out of your busy schedule’—takes its force not only from its linguistic structure, but also from
25
its imbrications with its medium. In other words, in taking recourse to blood to
make material their critique of the government, Bhopali activists animate its
potential to both remedy (a medium for critique) and poison (as a marker of
contamination).
Another set of public actions demonstrates this strategy in an analogous way. This
set of strategies again involves the activist- children canvassing at city schools for
support. After explaining the complexity of the issue and the seriousness of their
concerns to fellow teenagers, they ask for volunteers to cut out large paper hearts
of various colours. Once several such hearts have been carved out, the children
from Delhi reflect on what they have just heard and pen a letter on the cut-out
heart to the prime minister. The name of the campaign gives away its affective
ploy. The ‘Have a Heart, Prime Minister’ campaign is built on the idea that these
carved hearts are donations to the prime minister to be transplanted for his
obviously missing organ. If his heart were indeed in its place, it would not allow
him to turn a deaf ear to the suffering of the activist-children. The conceit of the
campaign is again ironic: it entails medical philanthropy (altruistic organ
donation) from Bhopali children who have been deprived promised, free medical
treatment. The gift of the heart (again) is indicative of the ‘gift’ not given—that of
state assistance and medical care. However, this exceeds the partonomic script of
the Sant Nirankari donation. Devoid of sincerity and suffused with irony, the
donation of the heart forms a meta-commentary on the indissociability of gifting
from extraction, of poison from remedy. It is no accident that the heart is not a
replaceable organ; in a biological sense, its ‘donation’ implies death for the
donor. In a powerful philanthropic gesture that is both playful and sobering, the
poorest and most medically deprived donate a pseudo-organ to the person they
see as responsible for their deprivation. The ‘philanthropists’ here are those
without the resources to gift in the first place.
The giving of the gift in this activist mobilization stalled at the heavily guarded
gates of the prime minister’s residence, just a few miles from the site of the
protest. The survivors could only look on, as an aide would finally take the hearts
into the guarded compound and disappear down the long pathway towards the
residence bungalow.
26
Yet, even in this failure, the survivors had successfully dramatized the underlying
message of their bodily protest: that there is a pathology even more debilitating
than the ones they live with—namely the biomoral pathology of neglect and
corruption. While their own lives are a testament to ways in which moral and
meaningful lives may be forged in the face of stark impairment, the activists take
pride in that this form of life is at least more vital than the disrepair of the body
politic— literally congealed in the metaphor of the prime minister’s heart.
Reverse partonomy
We have sought to show how philanthropy may critique not only in the sense of
drawing attention to the human suffering it seeks to repair (a kind of critique by
default or implication) but more directly as the part given over, which, by virtue of
the gap between it and the whole it is extracted from, is able to draw attention to
that which is held back. We want to now reverse the equation. It is important to
destabilize the model; this also helps us to show its peculiar dynamism. Might the
withheld whole also illuminate the conceits of the proffered part? We argue that
critique can travel both ways along the partonomy— partonomic philanthropy is a
flexible critical form.
We quote from a poem by Varavara Rao,47 which was written in response to
upper-caste protests against the Indian government’s move to institutionalize
affirmative action in higher education and public employment (original in
Telugu):
We stand in hospital queues
To sell blood to buy food. Except For the smell of poverty and hunger How can
it acquire
The patriotic flavour
Of your blood donation?
Like the gifts of paper hearts, the words of the poem are laced with irony. Yet
here the gift not given critiques that which is. Blood donation is now an
established mode of public protest throughout India,48 and
47We first came across this poem on the alternative Indian news and commentary website Kafila.org
(https://kafila.online/2009/02/18/castegender- in-a-poem-by-varavara-rao/, [accessed 13 January 2018]).
48 Copeman, Veins of Devotion; J. Copeman and A. Street, ‘The image after Strathern: art and persuasive relationality in
India’s sanguinary politics’, Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 31, no. 2–3, 2014, pp. 185–220.
27
some of the most prominent uses of blood donation in order to protest have
been as a component of anti-reservation agitations. For instance, in 2007, trainee
medics in Bangalore fasted, conducted numerous boycotts, formed a silent
human chain, and donated blood in protest against proposals to reserve 27 per
cent of places in elite medical institutions for so-called Other Backward
Classes.49 In a riposte to the special privileges claimed by pro-reservation
campaigners, protesters sought to occupy the modernist-integrative high ground
in protesting philanthropically (the beneficiaries being pointedly no one in particular). For all the poetic licence taken here (as if all low-caste people had to
sell their blood to survive), the point is compellingly made that one has to be of a
certain socio-economic status to even begin to consider voluntarily shedding one’s
blood as a means of political expression. The ‘We’ of the poem—labourers, those
of non-elite status who might qualify for reservations—are hardly likely to consider
that they possess the surplus blood necessary to shed it in order to form political
statements (they are far more likely to consider their bodies to contain a deficit).
Thus, that which is not given—that which indeed may be sold—dramatically
highlights the self-serving underlay of the ‘integrative’, ‘charitable’, and ‘patriotic’
protest blood donation and its class basis. The drama of the mediatized blood
gift, suggests Rao, all too easily deflects attention from other ungiven substances of
the civic and bare survival: food, water.
We suggest that it is not that the model of partonomic critique is destabilized by
the example of Rao’s poem, but that it is reversible: the proportional elements of
transactions can be pejoratively valued as surfeits and deficits, and become subject
to moral judgements; the given and the withheld, so to speak, comment on one
another: the given upon the withheld or, indeed, the withheld upon the given.
Conclusion: substance exchange and partonomic philanthropy
What role do substances, and in particular blood, play in broader conversations
about philanthropy in South Asia? In focusing on the how of activism as much as
the why, we showed how donated and received bodily substance in different
iterations are both reformist and remedial, extractive and poisonous. Disease is
indexed by a disjunction
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between the substance-code relation, magnified upon the body of the putative
Indian family, the divided post-colonial nation, and the corrupt post-liberalization
state. Its cure relies on an invocation of malaise, followed by the philanthropic
donation that realigns cause, character, and the materiality of the substance at
hand. We have called this form of exchange partonomic to characterize how that
which is given indicates the whole that is withheld, thereby instantiating a mode of
philanthropic critique.
Yet, at every instance, substance exchanges reveal the fragility of such scenes of
critique. Thus, Nirankari blood donations seek to recuperate the family to the
end of a common future humanity, at the same time as they glorify a this-worldly
satguru. The blood- camps of political rallies too walk a fine line between
sincerity and self-interest, between the camp organizers’ desire for a universal
philanthropic good and the messy extractive modes of realpolitik. Finally, the
blood-writing of Bhopali children makes this relation between instruction and
corruption starkly explicit, where activist political conviction depends on irony
and where the material index of sincerity bears the historical mark of political
corruption and environmental contamination.
Thus, the material giving of blood and the metaphoric donation of organs allow
us to point to ambivalence and fragility within philan- thropic practices. The gift is
both a marker of conviction and the bearer of its own undoing. In other words,
partonomic philanthropy carries with it a circular threat; the utopic and the
corrupt are joined in a dangerous, substantial proximity. The promise of a future
through the gift is fraught with the danger of invoking violent pasts and revealing a
divided present. The blood gift particularly points to a breakdown of the
substance-code relation, a malaise at once material, biological, and political. But,
in the practices of its giving, its pedagogic and reformist aims never escape its
messy origins. Our aim here has been to not try and disentangle the philanthropic
from self-interest, the abstract idea of a common good from the malaise it seeks
to reform, or the reformist substance from the extractive and the contaminated.
Rather, we have sought to point to this very dialectic as the productive motor of
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philanthropic practices. In the philanthropic oscillations between the abstract and
concrete, we see that the gift is never quite given, nor is its promise quite fulfilled.
To understand the work of philanthropy then is to understand its conjunctive
tense: a fragile state between embodied critique and bodily extraction, and in
which the scene of critique is never cleanly detached from the scene of
corruption.